Where are you from?

A self-documentary on origins

by Leanne Yanabu

I joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to Mali, in West Africa. I was obviously a foreigner there, and when Malians asked "I be bo min?" (Where do you come from?"), I had no problems answering, "N bora Ameriki", (I'm from America) once I learned how to say it in Bambara.

But. When I came back to the United States and ended up in Carbondale, Illinois, I began to notice how often I got asked, "Where are you from?" It seemed like every time I went outside my usual sphere, casual strangers would ask where I was from. And it wasn't even like I got into involved conversations with people before they asked me where I was from. The guy in the check-out line at Kroger, my neighbor down the street, the bus driver who picked me up at the airport, some guy at the co-op: they all wanted to know where I was from. What the heck?? What was behind this insatiable curiosity about my personal origins?

I thought I knew what it was. I think what they meant was, "How come you look different from everybody else?" "Where are you from?" is a polite way of asking an impolite question: "What is your racial background?" It's a dilemma; on the one hand, I'm not ashamed of my racial origins, but it shouldn't be the first label that gets attached to me. I'd rather have someone ask me "What's your name?", or "What do you do for a living?", or even "How do you do?".

If I tell them what they really want to know and say I'm half Japanese and half Okinawan with maybe some Chinese lurking about in the bushes, from then on I'll be the image they conjure up in their mind of what Japanese and Okinawan and Chinese people look like. I don't want to be some kind of United Nations representative.

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